I think your post was very well written, but I just wanted to comment on this in particular:

This, for me, is the biggest "problem" with Slashdot today. A huge amount of posters go in for that "+5 Funny" post, and apart from articles on politics, it's hard to find much good discussion going on.

I remember when I first started reading Slashdot back in early 2000 (or could it have been late 1990's?). I used to save threads because they contained so much interesting information (especially about physics and astronomy). Maybe it's just me remembering things better than they actually were...

But seriously, try reading the comments for any article that has to do with Uranus. Or lasers. Or sharks. Or Russia. Or in fact most any article. "Funny" posts everywhere. The remainder is blatant trolls, whining about the EU/US, politicians, lawyers or accusing everyone of being employed by the company that they dared write anything positive about.

And on top that you have people modding funny comments as Insightful or Interesting, because "Funny mod doesn't give karma"

Thanks for the explanation. I must admit my particle physics is very weak (not that that will stop me from commenting..)

I can not remember ever having seen an example where an annihilation produces anything other than photons, but I guess it's usually simplified that way for us laymen. Anyways, it makes sense now that I think about it.

I think you are confusing "massive" and "strongly interacting".

The whole point of "dark matter" is that it interacts gravitationally with ordinary matter, but almost never in any other way. So, having massive dark matter particles means a higher gravitational field around them, but nothing else.

I agree with your other point however, that having two of these dark matter particles annihilating directly to a electron/positron pair seems.. strange. Normal matter/antimatter annihilations always (afaik) produce "energy" (i.e. photons).

But a good thing is that if annihilation of dark matter produces electron/positron pairs, then smashing electrons and positrons together in an accelerator should produce dark matter.

You don't have to be corrupt to be swayed by someones arguments...

Well, I've always preferred id's 'tech demos' to most games. For some strange reason the tech demos seems to give you more actual play time and less movie watching.

I think you are underestimating the amount of people who are not willing to wait 6 months.

Yeah... The only way to figure out how an open source project works is to infiltrate it. Makes sense.

The Kindle Touch still has touch. This article complains that the Kindle that does not include a touch screen, can not handle touch input.

Indeed. I picked up the $79 model (well, $100 without ads) exactly because it didn't have touchscreen. I tend to hold my Kindle in a way that rests at least one finger on the screen. I do not want it doing stuff because of that.

And I've never actually used the keyboard on my old Kindle, so the lack of one felt like an added feature. But I guess this new type of move-cursor-keyboard will be annoying for those who do use it.

As for the 3G part, that seems like a bigger deal. The 3G versions cost more than the WiFi versions, and I would assume at least some people who bought wanted to use it for browsing.

I tried switching from FF3 to FF6 recently. I did not like it at all.
Currently been running Chrome for a few days, it's OK, but has some irritating issues (for me).

Will try Opera next week.
Then IE.
Then I will give up and move to some deserted island and avoid modern browsers for ever.

While data speeds will of course depend a lot on how large cells the network operator is using, the number of users in that cell, the usage pattern of each user etc etc, latency should be overall noticeably lower in an LTE network compared to 3G networks of today.

A lot of the latency that is felt by the user is caused by the Radio Access Network (RAN) infrastructure, and the way that the core network operates. In LTE, a lot of design decisions have been made that aim to reduce latency, in part by simplifying the RAN and in part by modernizing the core networks.

Computer gaming (highly latency sensitive stuff like shooters) is commonly mentioned as a key application for LTE users.

Well, whoever spawned the process in question might care, since AL is the return/error code after termination!

I would have thought you old timers had learned your lessons about skimping on what you assumed to be unimportant bytes ;)

Except that, according to TFA:

They can, yes. Much more common is for the central node (RNC) to run on GPS time, and the nodes at the towers to synchronize to the ATM link they're hooked up to.

And even if they do run on a straight GPS feed, the hold-over time for the timing circuits is good enough that you probably need to jam it for several days to see an effect, giving the operator time enough to take counter-measures.